Temptation E-Book

János Székely

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A hilarious and poignant rediscovered classic: the story of a young boy's struggle and (mis)adventures as he escapes poverty in interwar Budapest Béla has never had much luck. Abandoned in foster care and almost starved by his guardian, he must fight for everything, from scraps of food to the right to go to school. At fourteen he is caught trying to steal a pair of shoes; his mother is called and reluctantly takes him with her to the capital. So begins Béla's energetic flight to escape poverty. Propelled by little more than exuberant charm, he finds his feet working in a grand old hotel, where a more privileged life seems to extend a hand to him. But as Béla becomes entangled with the beautiful daughter of an American businessman and a passionate revolutionary colleague, he must try to find a way to forge his own life from the divergent influences around him. An endlessly entertaining, picaresque classic with a rich vein of bawdy humour, Temptation is an under-appreciated masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction. János Székely was a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter. He fled Budapest for Berlin, where he penned scripts for silent movie stars including Marlene Dietrich. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States and continued writing for films in Hollywood, winning an Academy Award for Best Story for Arise, My Love in 1940. His novel Temptation was initially published in English translation in 1946 under the pseudonym John Pen. Blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Székely spent several years in Mexico with his family before returning to Berlin in 1957. He died there in 1958.

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CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEONE: Me and the Fine Young Gentleman 123456789101112131415TWO: Me and Her Excellency’s Dog 1234567891011121314151617THREE: Me and the Smiling Machinist 12345678910111213141516ABOUT THE AUTHORABOUT THE PUBLISHERCOPYRIGHT

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ONE

Me and the Fine Young Gentleman

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1

My life began like a real thriller: people were trying to kill me. But since this happened five months before I was born, I didn’t upset myself too much about it. Although, if what they say in the village is true, I had every right. My life dangled by the hair of a peasant’s head even before the five fingers that now hold this pen had had a chance to form.

My mother was sixteen at the time, and if the indications are to be believed, neither her soul nor her body wanted, one day, to have me call her “mother”. And fair enough—it’s not a blessing widely looked for by sixteen-year-old girls. But what my mother got up to—they tell me—went beyond all bounds. She revolted against motherhood as if she’d had the very Devil inside her. She resorted to the most shameful means, all the while doing the rounds of the churches, by turns kneeling and praying, then cursing the saints out of heaven. She ranted and raved, determined, come what may, not to have to birth me.

“If I’d loved that lousy father of his!” she said. “But I only saw him the once. Ain’t seen hide or hair of him since.”

And that was, indeed, the case. She’d met Mihály T. on the feast of St Peter and St Paul, seeing him neither before nor after. But the damage was done, though my mother wasn’t the sort of “slutty tramp”, as they used to say where I come from, who didn’t care, who would have gone with anything in trousers. But I don’t want to sugar-coat the thing, so let me tell it the way one of the women in the village, old Rozi—more about her anon—told it to me some time later.

According to her, “poor Anna” was no worse than the other young village girls. She was a quiet, neat girl with pale skin and black hair; she was beautiful. I remember her eyes most of all. She had unusually deep-set, small, black eyes, the sort that were always a little suspicious, 10always a little askance; a peasant’s eyes peeking sharply out at the world, and yet with something of an old, gentle sadness. She lived with her stepmother. Her father had died when she was young, and she’d never known her mother. They were crushingly poor and she worked the fields. As young as fifteen, she worked her fingers to the bone on the Count’s estate. So she more than deserved the little feast given for the labourers at St Peter and St Paul, where she met Mihály T.

He was renowned, Mihály T.—Mishka for short. Among themselves, the girls used to call him Dappermishka, all in one word, the way I’ve spelt it. Dappermishka had been born in the village, but left some ten years or so before. He was a wild-blooded adventurer by nature, and had left home as a teenager to go and see the world, like a boy in a fairy tale. Exotic stories had been doing the rounds about him ever since. Some folk said he’d become a ship’s captain, others a pirate on the high seas. In fact, he was neither ship’s captain nor pirate, but it’s true he was a sailor on an ocean steamer, which was in itself a great destiny in a peasant’s eyes. So Dappermishka had come home after ten years to show himself to the village, to let them see what had become of him. He was dressed carefully, with a genuine English briar pipe between his strong, fine, porcelain-white teeth and a little green cap he wore at a jaunty angle that he had bought—as he showed everyone—in Buenos Aires. He was a hot-blooded lad, strong as an ox, who swaggered, quarrelled and swept the girls off their feet. He strutted down the village streets like a cock pheasant, and was to be seen out by the haystacks with a different girl each night.

Anna didn’t know Dappermishka, but had nevertheless heard plenty about him. When on that memorable summer evening of St Peter and St Paul she finally set eyes on him, she was dismissive, to say the least.

“You’re all head over heels about that?” she said, good and loud for everyone to hear. “You’ve no damn sense at all.”

The other girls, loyal to a fault, lost no time at all repeating this to Dappermishka, but—as so often in life—this had the very opposite effect to what they’d wanted, obviously, to achieve. All of a sudden Dappermishka appeared, without a word, at Anna’s side, grabbed her by the waist and swept her into a csárdás, dancing with her again and 11again. What happened as they danced we’ll never really know. They say my mother swore afterwards she only danced with him for effect, so that all them slutty tramps would be green with envy. The fact remains, though, that she danced with Dappermishka till dawn and didn’t so much as look at anyone else.

It was a good, plentiful summer, the summer of 1912, and there was great excitement on the feast of St Peter and St Paul. His Lordship had provided enough stew for the village to stuff itself to bursting, secret stashes of wine flowed, they had a Gypsy band to play the csárdás. They say it was so hot that night that even at dawn people were covered in sweat, though they danced outdoors, in the open air. There was a small breeze sometime after midnight, it’s true, but it served only to set the tricolour paper lanterns on fire, and brought no relief. The wind itself was as hot as if it had come from a fiery oven. So they stamped the flaming lanterns out, leaving only the moon and the stars to light them from the sky. But that was enough for the young folk, or perhaps too much even, for couples began slipping off one after the other to secret corners.

Dappermishka asked my mother:

“Got a favourite song?”

“’Course. Everybody does.”

“What is it?”

“An old one. The Gypsies don’t play it now.”

“Oh really?” Dappermishka replied roguishly. “Well, tonight they’ll play nothin’ else!”

With that, he drew out a ten-pengő note, spat on it lustily and, like a carousing nobleman, stuck it on the bandleader’s forehead. The band struck up the tune right away. It was a corny old tune, my mother’s song:

I walked in the quiet forest glade

Saw a bird there in the shade

And a nest made just for two—

How I fell in love with you

And it was just as Dappermishka had said: the band played nothing else till dawn. The leader had, once or twice, screwed up his courage and 12tried to play something a little faster, but Dappermishka was there in a flash, setting about the band like a pack of wild dogs. So what could they do but play that slow, melancholy song until the break of dawn; and at a certain point Dappermishka crooned into my mother’s ear, so that the other girls all fairly burst:

“How I fell in love with you!”

It was a crazy night, and there was hardly a soul sober in the village. The free-flowing wine had had its effect, as had the all-too starry sky and the slow, steady music—and what generally happens under such circumstances happened that night too. All at once, Anna found herself lying on a haystack with Dappermishka. It was only for a few minutes, the poor girl recounted later, and she barely even knew what had happened when he was already reaching for his watch, crying out as if skinned alive:

“I’ll miss my damn train!”

With that he was up and across the open country before she’d adjusted her dress. He sprang off the end of the platform and leapt onto the end of the final carriage, a sight painful to watch, as the stationmaster recounted the day after.

So that’s how it happened. It was no great love affair, not by a long shot. It was just folly, and such things happen; stranger things having happened on St Peter and St Paul in years past. The next day, to hear old Rozi tell it, my mother shrugged it off. She had a headache from the wine and went round humming moodily. It wasn’t that she thought ill of Dappermishka, but she didn’t think well of him, either. She took the whole thing the way you usually take such foolish things. It had happened, and that was that. She was none the poorer for it.

And perhaps she had already forgotten Mihály T.’s famously beautiful eyes by the time she realized one day that she was in trouble. She ran straight to the wise women, of course, but by then it was too late. Old Rozi, who was one of these wise women, claims there was something not quite right with my mother’s womanly affairs that had stopped her noticing sooner. And of course she was young, too, and inexperienced in such things. Suffice to say that I was past three months by then.

Under normal circumstances, village midwives wouldn’t have shrunk 13from a three-month case, but there were good reasons for them to do so with me. About six months before, our chemist’s assistant had bled to death at the hands of an old quack in the next parish. It had become a nationwide scandal and the gendarmes had arrested a dozen women in our own village. There was much weeping and wailing, excitement and even a trial—the newspapers were full of it. After that, much to Anna’s dismay, the obscure but flourishing guild of angel-makers suddenly got very careful. There wasn’t a single one in the village who would help her.

My mother tried everyone, driven almost from her wits with desperation. She hitched a lift on every cart headed for a neighbouring parish, she tried all the neighbourhood midwives, quacks and old women who specialized in this sort of thing. They didn’t help her either; they just kept stringing her along. They gave her all sorts of mysterious creams, teas, pills and, of course, plenty of advice. They told her to take such scalding baths, poor thing, that her body was covered in blisters for weeks. Those didn’t help. The silver-tongued old ladies merely took the poor farmhand’s hard-earned savings and told her, always regretfully and somehow managing to keep a straight face, that they couldn’t help her at all:

“You come too late, dear!”

So Dear took her Sunday shawl, for this was around Advent time, and threw herself in the river. There was snow, the river had big blocks of ice floating on it, and yet the little peasant girl didn’t die. They dragged her out and she was absolutely fine—she hadn’t caught even so much as a blessed cold.

It seems I was a tough customer even as a foetus. The icy river couldn’t freeze me, the scalding baths couldn’t kill me, and the various creams, teas and pills didn’t do anything to hurt me. I was born, I lived, I was as healthy as can be. I was almost five and a half kilos at birth, the village had never seen anything like it. I bellowed so loud with my brand-new lungs, they say, that I put the herdsmen’s bugles to shame.

“Hideous,” my mother said succinctly when they showed me to her. With that, she turned to the wall and didn’t look at me again.

Well, I thought, if I’ve survived the icy river and the scalding baths, I’ll survive her judgement, too. And so I did. I grew, and gained weight, 14and developed muscles, though I don’t fully know how myself. People paid more attention to stray dogs than they did to me. I grew like weeds and brambles, and was just as hard to get rid of, that’s for sure.

They say the first word I uttered was bugger. I picked up mother much later. Unhappily, this was due not so much to my mischievous nature as a sad reflection of how often I must—even as an infant—have been called by that juicy epithet; and how little, by contrast, I must have heard that gentler word that people down our way had such a wonderfully sweet way of pronouncing: “muther”.

My own muther took up as a wet nurse in Budapest two weeks after I was born. She visited me in the village at most four or five times a year. It’s hard to say, after all this time, why she came so infrequently. She may not have been able to get more time off, or maybe she couldn’t afford the rail fare, or perhaps she still thought me so abominably hideous. Most likely, it was a combination of all three. Suffice to say that I did have a mother and I didn’t, and I mostly didn’t rather than did. And that good, wholesome milk that the very law of nature had set aside for me was gobbled instead by the premature offspring of a Budapest textile merchant, coddled in swaddling like an ailing silkworm.

So much, then, for the law. It seems even the laws of nature, ancient though they are, exist for people to try and get round them whenever they can.

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So i stayed in the village with old Rozi, who despite having such a charming name, was the most disreputable old woman there. When she’d got too old to pursue her original profession, she devoted herself to bringing up illegitimate boys like myself—if you could call what she did to us an upbringing.

They say she was once a great beauty, a blonde and blue-eyed Slovak girl. At the age of fifteen, she became a maid in the household of the Count; it was he who’d brought her here from the Slovak lands. Rozi served three years as a maid before giving birth to a bouncing baby boy. The child’s father was almost a child himself: the Count’s sixteen-year-old son. They kicked Rozi out the moment they saw her belly filling out, but they couldn’t get rid of her that easily. She was cunning, the pretty little Slovak girl, and knew what she was doing. She kicked up such a fuss, quarrelling and wheedling, threatening them with lawyers and who knows what else, that her master eventually opened his wallet. With his money, she bought the little house at the edge of the village in which I, too, was later brought up.

Six months after her severance from the Count’s household, Rozi’s baby died. His death was very unexpected, and to this day, the rumour in the village is that she had helped along his demise. That may, of course, just be village gossip, but knowing old Rozi as I do, I wouldn’t rule it out for a second.

By that time, she was receiving regular visits from some local potentate who would always drive in from the neighbouring parish in his trap. He was married and had a family and could only come on Saturdays; and since there is more than one day in the week, Rozi made sure over time that she had visitors those other days as well. In the end, she was measuring her love out for sale the way others measured out wheat. 16

She was a thrifty soul and saved the money she made from her embraces assiduously. Soon, she had the rickety house put in order, a new fence built around the yard, and later bought a good deal of land. She prospered so visibly that the entire village was eaten up with jealousy.

Then one day something that so often happens to women like her—who want men only for their money—happened to her too. She fell in love with a man who wanted nothing from her but her money.

He was a big, dim fellow with bovine eyes, and I could never understand why, of all the dozens of men she’d known, she fell for him specifically. When I was home last, I ended up asking her. She herself couldn’t really explain it.

“Well, he never was what you might call handsome, you see,” she reflected in her strange, slightly foreign accent, “but the girls, they mad about him!”

So he wasn’t even handsome, that fellow, and I know from extensive first-hand experience that he certainly wasn’t clever. Besides all that, as old Rozi told it, he was poor as a church mouse, so poor that when he first came to the village, you could see his backside through his trousers. He was a ragtag sort of wanderer, of the sort girls usually didn’t give a second thought.

“I was consumed with curiosity, you see,” old Rozi admitted, “as to what his secret could be, this nothing man.”

But “secrets” like that tend to stay secret for ever. A nothing sort of man comes along, a ragtag sort, not bright, nor handsome, or even rich, and yet the local women tear themselves apart over him. Even though, if what old Rozi told me is true, he wasn’t too bothered with the ladies, they all ran after him as if possessed.

He had only one real passion, and that was fishing. He had a beautiful fishing rod he’d made himself, and he would sit alone with it day in, day out, on the riverbank, saying not a word. He was absolutely convinced that fish knew human speech and if they heard it, wouldn’t go anywhere near the hook. Woe betide anyone who raised their voice while he was waiting for the fish to bite.

Old Rozi was so consumed by “curiosity” that one day she went down to the river where the lonely fisherman sat. She paraded past him 17once or twice, but “he don’t even look at me, you see. Not so much as glance sideways.”

But old Rozi was not one to get discouraged and kept going back down to the river till one day the man took pity on her. Not that he said anything to her—like I say, he couldn’t stand anyone talking while he was fishing—but instead nodded silently to say that she could sit down beside him. So Rozi sat down. She didn’t dare say a thing, watching the river quietly. He didn’t say anything either, just stuck out his left hand leisurely, so that he didn’t upset the rod in his right, and placed it on her breast in total silence. They sat like that for a long time, not a word between them. Rozi was, in her words, “fit to burst” by the time the man finally deigned to tie his rod to the reeds and lay her down on the grassy bank.

“Don’t you breathe a sound, though!” he whispered in her ear. “So’s not to scare the fish.”

This sounds like a made-up story, but it had such an impact on Rozi that from that day on she didn’t let that man out of her sight. She put him in her house at the edge of the village and devoted everything she got from other men to the upkeep of this one.

He remained just as calm as he’d always been. There was nothing in the world that could upset him, certainly not Rozi’s profession. As long as he got to spend his days fishing by the river and had a litre or two of wine with his fish paprikás at supper, the missus could do as she liked. He lived on the money Rozi made with her favours like a lazy, kept mistress. In the village, they called him Mr Rozi, and even we children used to call him that among ourselves.

Rozi was by then no longer in her first youth. She must have been around thirty, an advanced age for a peasant girl. Her more genteel clientele began to fade away and Rozi was forced to lower prices and try to make up the difference by increasing turnover.

Mr Rozi went on happily working his way through the young peasant girls. Not that he desperately wanted them, but to kill the boredom while he waited for the fish, he’d occasionally signal to one or another that they could sit down beside him. And they came and sat.

Rozi knew, and pretended not to. It wasn’t as if she could say anything, so she just looked on and “agonized”. She would spend nights 18tossing and turning next to her snoring man, suffering pins and needles around her heart and cold sweats. This dissolute slattern, who’d been selling herself since the age of fifteen, was suddenly so overcome with jealousy that it was like an incurable illness.

One day she couldn’t take any more, so she got to thinking and called the tailor to have a new suit made for her man.

“What’s that for, then?” he asked, not being in the least bit vain.

“What for? For wedding. You can’t wear old one to wedding.”

“What wedding? Who the hell’s gettin’ married?”

“You and me, of course!”

He just stood there silent for a bit, because it took him a while to understand. When he finally did, he broke quietly into a smile.

“You can tell you’re Slovak,” he said, “by how cunning you think.”

But he wasn’t against the idea. Marriage? Why not. If the missus wanted it, let her have her way. After all, she brought home the bacon. Fortunately, the weather was lousy on their wedding day and he couldn’t have gone fishing anyway.

Rozi, on the other hand, took their marriage very seriously indeed. The ring, the marriage certificate and the priest’s sermon revolutionized her life. From that day on, she drove her visitors away, every one.

“Husband won’t have it!” she’d say haughtily, though she knew full well that her “husband” would have fallen off his chair laughing if he’d heard her.

Two weeks after the wedding, she got on the train and went to the county town. To learn to be a midwife, she said. The village roared with laughter. Show me the poor forsaken fool, they said, who’s going to have an innocent babe brought into the world by the likes of her!

But Rozi knew what she was doing. She wasn’t going to bring babies into the world. Far from it. From then on, she made her living stopping children from being born.

Her idea paid off. The village abortionists were outmoded, ignorant and dirty old women, and everyone preferred to go to Rozi when they got into trouble. And they got into trouble pretty often, especially in the winter, when people have time on their hands. 19

But old Rozi kept another, larger business, too. Peasant girls who got into trouble and whom it was too late to “help”, like my mother, could do their lying-in at hers. She would even feed them till they were strong enough to go up to the city as wet nurses. Their children stayed with Rozi and the poor girls, who in this way dealt with all their troubles in one fell swoop, couldn’t thank her enough. Then, of course, they got to send the better half of their already meagre salaries to their selfless saviour for more or less the rest of their days.

This woman, this indestructible woman, was like a cat—she always landed on her feet. She was now making a living from other people’s love affairs as she had once done from her own. The house at the edge of the village underwent a veritable renaissance. She now had pigs, cows and chickens; she had a horse, a cart and a maid.

But whenever possible, she would go out fishing with her man by the river. She didn’t like to leave Mr Rozi alone much, and looked after him like some precious heirloom, though Mr Rozi was hardly a gilded youth any more. He must have been the same age as Rozi, and Rozi must have been pushing forty.

At that time, she had eight little bastard boys living with her. Rozi could easily have retired. Eight young servant girls in various different cities throughout the country worked in her stead from sunup to sundown. She just kept raking in the money, so that eventually she was among the richest peasants in our desperately poor little village. People even stopped bringing up her past because, as they say, bygones should be bygones, and more to the point, dogs may bark, but money talks.

Rozi began putting on weight. On Sundays, she’d wear a black silk dress buttoned to the neck and a cross as big as a bishop’s. She changed her way of talking, too. She was no longer playful and chatty, but considered every word she said. She would talk to the little peasant girls who came to her in the family way with sanctimonious condescension, making it clear that though she looked down on them, she would forgive them in the name of our merciful Lord. She was short with the poor and would brook no familiarity, scolding her maids all the livelong day; but if a wealthy farmer greeted her on the market square, she was all honeyed words and gestures. In a word, she’d started acting like a lady.20

She became religious. Before, she’d never gone to church, but now she would kneel for hours like a nun. She hung a huge picture of the Virgin Mary over the tired old couch where previously she’d frolicked with her clients, with an eternal flame burning under it in a gold-rimmed red glass.

One day, she turned to Mr Rozi.

“Ever thought about death, Jóska?”

“The hell I have!”

“Watch your mouth, I’m serious. We can’t leave all this to dogs!”

Mr Rozi shrugged. Money hadn’t changed him; he still didn’t care anything about anything as long as his belly was full and he was left alone. Not so Rozi. She was going for immortality.

“We ought to make child.”

“Right here?” asked Mr Rozi, since they were out on the street at the time.

But he had no objection to this either. Children? Why not. If the missus wanted it, let her have her way. He wasn’t going to have to give birth to it. And she brought home the bacon. It was the least he could do. You couldn’t fish at night, anyway.

“It could be here by Christmas,” old Rozi said.

But it wasn’t. And it didn’t come for Easter either—it never came at all. This woman—who had been pregnant God knows how often when she hadn’t wanted to be—couldn’t get pregnant now that it was her greatest wish. She ran from one doctor to the next, went to the county town and even the capital. She took baths, pills, home-made concoctions. Nothing worked. Maybe it’s my man, she thought; she tried others. That didn’t help either.

For the first time in her life, she lost her head. She came and went like a madwoman. She couldn’t, she wouldn’t accept it, and she was convinced that everything she owned would “go to dogs”.

One day, she tore the picture of the Virgin Mary off the wall and hurled it in the corner, candle and all. There wasn’t a man alive who could’ve cursed the way she swore then. She spent entire days under a dark cloud and beat the children. Then she grew eerily calm. She threw herself into a corner of the front room and just sat there motionless for 21hours with the shutters closed. She would occasionally mutter something to herself, her hollow mouth moving almost soundlessly, like a defunct mechanism falling to bits.

She started going grey. She lost weight, shrivelled, grew old overnight. She became a mean and crotchety old woman.

She had always been mean, but at least till then her meanness had had some purpose. She had turned it into money, silks, gold chains, the pigs in the sty and the cow in the shed. Now her meanness became as barren as her womb, and she took no profit from it any more. She was wicked for the sake of it. She derived a perverse, inhuman pleasure, a revolting, sick satisfaction from causing others pain. But it also happened, which never used to happen before, that she was good. Then she would give gifts to all and sundry, be charming to everyone she met, and shower the children with frantic kisses. But this was a macabre and dangerous kind of goodness, and once a fit of it had passed, she was a hundred times meaner than before.

22

3

She detested me from the moment I was born.

I know that sounds unlikely. It may be that a grown-up doesn’t particularly like a child left to their care, or they suddenly lose their temper, but detest?… It sounds unlikely, and yet it’s true: she hated me. Not with some passing flicker of hate, either, born of irritable folk rubbing each other the wrong way, fading as quickly as it had come. No, this was a grave and consistent—almost masculine—hatred, you might say. It was permanent war, with not so much as a single truce in the entire fourteen years I spent under her roof.

The roots of this hatred must have gone alarmingly deep. I was born at just around the time she learnt, once and for all, that she would never have children. Maybe that was why she hated me. I don’t know, it’s just a guess. “For what man knoweth the things of a man,” as St Paul writes to the Corinthians, “save the spirit of man which is in him?”

I wasn’t what you might call a loveable child. I should make that much clear right now. I was unusually unfriendly, almost standoffish, suspicious, stubborn, and always ready to strike. By the age of seven, I was utterly devoid of what is commonly called boyish charm.

I have a photograph from back then, a group photo one boy’s mother had taken of us. I’ve seen few less likeable children than myself in that image. There’s something scary and rough about my entire being. My shoulders look like I’d borrowed them from someone five years older, and my face is hard, mean and low. I’m distinctly hideous in this photo, though on closer examination, my looks are not unattractive. I had quite large, deep-grey eyes, a strong, straight nose, a fine, determined mouth, and black hair that fell neatly to my brow. My looks were so fully formed that they haven’t changed much since, and that was probably the trouble. I had the face of a man, and the things that make a man’s face masculine make a child’s face ugly. 23

They say that at the age of five or six I was at daggers drawn with the grown-ups around me. I never opened my mouth if I wasn’t spoken to, and when I was, I gave short, snappish answers. I faced them with my hands jammed in my pockets, legs spread wide apart and chin forced down to my neck; that’s how I looked up at them, like a bull, head down, ready to charge.

“What face you make again!” old Rozi would yell at me half a dozen times a day. “You look like murderer.”

Yes, I was probably not the most charming of children, but then how, pray tell, was I supposed to be? Life does not begin at the moment of birth. They say that the emotional shocks suffered by a woman with child will often leave physical traces on her baby. Is it far-fetched, then, for me to feel that the deep-seated hatred that filled my mother as she bore me has left its mark on my life ever since? I don’t know. This, too, is just a guess. But I do clearly remember that I was perfectly aware of my situation by the age of seven. I knew that there wasn’t a creature on God’s green earth, my mother included, who truly cared about my miserable fate; that there was nothing but hunters and hunted in this poachers’ world, and I was not a hunter.

I thought that was natural. I was absolutely convinced that people were only good when they had to be. Bastard children had to be; rich people did not. I envied Rozi, that she could afford to be bad. Anyone who could afford to be bad had made it.

I was surprised by people being good to me. I was suspicious when they were. Why would someone be good to a little bastard? What were they after? I wondered, suspecting the worst, and if I realized they didn’t want anything, I looked at them as if they’d had two noses or three hands. I thought people like that a little mad. Unnatural. Grass is green, the sky is blue, and man is mean. At least, anyone with any brains. Only Mad Wilma was good, and she was the laughing stock of the village.

When I think about it, I didn’t even really know what the grown-ups meant by good. I thought it was some hollow slogan they’d thought up to fool children with. A lot of words were like that. Religion, for example. There was the Sunday religion that people practised in church, and the everyday religion people practised in the village, and I didn’t understand 24what the two had to do with each other. Old Rozi was religious too. She’d kneel for hours in front of the picture of the Virgin, and when she was having one of her fits of kindness, she wouldn’t shut up about “Christian charity”. As for what her Christian charity actually meant, I had more than my fair share of chances to discover. They could pour their sanctimonious words on me by the bucket; they meant nothing to me, just like their threats about the bogeyman. I didn’t believe in their bogeyman, and I didn’t believe in their fine, sanctimonious words either. I only believed in what I saw.

There was a sort of mischievous squirrel bounding around inside me, snickering softly and pulling faces each time the grown-ups parroted these words. But I never actually said a thing. A skunk protects itself with its smell, the peasant with his stupidity. Faced with grown-ups, I adopted an expression so vacuous, I looked like a cow chewing the cud. I thought them dumb, dishonest, base creatures, and I wasn’t going to stand around arguing with them. I just watched their hypocritical faces, looking up with my head down, my chin pressed against my neck and my legs spread wide, hands in my pockets, saying nothing. I was completely unapproachable.

Honour thy father and thy mother, they preached. Very well, I said to myself, you do that. The squirrel jumped, stuck out his tongue and snickered. I’d never seen my father in my life, and all I knew about my mother was that she didn’t concern herself overly with me. Four or five times a year a peasant girl came, a total stranger, spent the afternoon with me, and left. They told me she was my mother.

Secretly, I was terrified of these visits. I was seized by an awkward, suffocating anxiety whenever I saw her. I remember I would get a bitter taste in my mouth, as if chewing something rotten. As to why that was, I couldn’t have told you. My mother was kind to me, never beat me, never even quarrelled; on the contrary, she used to bring me five krajcárs’ worth of potato sweets, and I would have done almost anything for those. There were other advantages to her visits. On those days, I got a good lunch and could eat as much as I wanted, something that never happened otherwise. “Coincidentally” we always had my favourite food for lunch: székelygulyás stew and noodles with cottage cheese and 25bacon. I would have forgone both, though, if that strange peasant girl had only changed her mind and stayed at home.

She would always send a postcard to say when she was coming, and I would be filled with anxiety days in advance. She used to come on Sundays in the early afternoon. I would hide from the others. I used regularly to lock myself in the wooden shed that was the privy, attached to the back wall of the house, and if I wasn’t disturbed, I would sit for hours on the boards, shipshape and scrubbed white, staring dully at the fat green flies humming greedily as they feasted in the pit below. These were times of great, heavy silence. Old Rozi and Mr Rozi were having their afternoon sleep, the maid had the afternoon off, and the children had scattered. The summer sun beat down on the roof of the wooden privy, the air was suffocating with its heat and smells, and the sweat streamed off me as my eyelids grew heavier and heavier. I would sit and wait like that, my head drooping down onto my chest, drifting in and out of sleep, until the bell of the little gate would interrupt the Sunday silence.

“Béééla!” called my mother’s voice. “Rozi!”

I stood up, spat heavily, and then with the slow, deliberate steps of an old peasant, ambled over to my mother.

We weren’t in the habit of kissing ladies’ hands by way of greeting. My mother kissed my face, I never kissed hers. I don’t know if she ever noticed, but if she did, she never said anything. She was a hard-natured woman who couldn’t stand artificial sweetness. The other mothers would clamour with effusive, sentimental nicknames for their offspring, but she just sat beside me quietly. You could tell she had her private opinion of them.

“What news, Béla?” she asked seriously, simply, as if talking to a grown-up.

“None,” I said, thinking of the sweets.

And my mother really would reach into her battered handbag and take out a packet of potato sweets.

Meanwhile, the kitchen door sprang open in a distinctly melodramatic way and old Rozi came out, swishing imperiously in her black silks, with her big cross, like a village queen. 26

“How are you, how are you, dear?” she’d murmur as soon as she saw my mother. “Long time no see. How are you, precious?”

“Thank you, Rozi,” my mother replied humbly. “I’m all right.”

The old woman patted my mother’s shoulder with condescension and a saccharine smile, looking her up and down with a hard, malicious eye the while.

“What lovely fine dress you have, precious,” she noted with extraordinarily mean-spirited emphasis, a reminder of the money my mother owed her; her sickly-sweet smile never faded from her lips.

“This thing? It’s five years old, Rozi,” my mother replied awkwardly, and quickly changed the subject. All her clothes were exactly five years old, poor thing.

Like in a well-rehearsed play, that was how these conversations used to go, more or less word for word, visit after visit, year after year. And then came the second act: scolding me.

“That son of yours, precious!” jabbered the old woman, “Why, he biggest good-for-nothing ever born!”

“That son of yours, precious, he end up on gallows one day, on my soul!”

“That son of yours…”

It went on like that for half an hour or so. She listed all my sins of the last quarter, down to the littlest detail. She had an incredible memory, and never left anything out. Everything she said was true, but what she forgot to say was why I did all those things. At the end of the day, the root cause of almost all my misbehaviour was that she wasn’t giving me enough to eat.

But I had learnt early that silence was golden. I neither accused her nor defended myself. I just stood there, my legs spread wide, hands in my pockets, and stared at the old woman’s gap-toothed mouth as she spilt her verbal slop.

My mother, too, was silent. She shook her head in increasing irritation, and from time to time shot an angry look at me. When the old woman finally finished, she’d start up herself.

“That the earth don’t swallow you for shame, you ungrateful boy! After all the kindness Rozi’s shown you!” 27

That was what she always said, word for word. Well, I thought, you can keep running your pie-hole as much as you like. Just you try old Rozi’s kindness! Then whoops! the squirrel did a little hop, sticking out his tongue. But I just stood there, silent.

“I’ll see he gets what’s comin’ to him, the little good-for-nothing,” she said menacingly. “Come on, you shameful creature.”

I went. With heavy, deliberate steps. At the end of the garden, there was a peach tree with a decaying, backless little bench beneath. We sat down there. My mother’s demeanour changed as if she’d become a different person the second we were out of range of the old woman. Instead of berating me again, she looked quickly around to make sure no one could overhear, and then softly asked:

“She givin’ you enough to eat?”

“No she damn well ain’t!” I replied. “Only when you come.”

This, too, was a scene we’d play every time. My mother would knit her brow and stare silently in front of her for a while. Then she’d say:

“I’ll have a word with her.”

Even at the age of five, I knew that was a barefaced lie. Squirrel snickered away quietly. As if she really would have a word with the old woman, I thought to myself, like hell she would! I know now that the poor thing was always behind on her payments, and was in constant fear of Rozi putting me out on the street, or sending me up to live with her in Budapest. But I knew none of that back then. All I knew of the whole thing was that my mother was lying to me. Instead of taking the old woman to task, she was all sweetness and light with her; it was enough to make you sick.

But I never said a word about that, either. I just sat on the rickety bench under the old peach tree and held my tongue. The sun beat down on the tree, and little yellow latticed spots of light trembled in the shade. I stared at those. My mother, too, just stared with those small, black, deep-set eyes of hers into the distance, or drew meaningless shapes in the dirt with the point of her shoe.

Around us, the yard was full of life. All the young mothers were chattering away, all over their little boys, playing with them, running about and teasing them so you could hear their boisterous mothering all the way down the street. 28

My mother, I could see, didn’t really know what to do with me. She was no good at endearments, either in word or deed, and she was generally in no mood to play. So she just sat there beside me as beside another grown-up with whom she had nothing particular to talk about.

I, too, was to blame for our not getting closer. My mother did, occasionally, experience a sort of strange and timid affection, but I—without meaning to—always trampled on these delicate buds of feeling. I remember she asked me once why I “looked so mean” all the time.

“Go on, have a laugh for once!” she said cheerfully, tickling me.

I was naturally ticklish, so I jumped up and she ran after me. When she caught up with me, she grabbed me, pulled me close, and kissed me again and again. I don’t know why, but at that moment I was overcome with an indescribably awkward feeling, a vague but intense shame. I pulled away from her with something akin to revulsion. As if she’d felt it, she let go of me at once. She didn’t say anything, just quietly adjusted her kerchief and went in to old Rozi to “settle up”.

Settling up was always hard. The old woman must have kept on about her arrears, because you could hear the sound of loud and bitter arguing from the front room, and when my mother came back to the yard, you could always tell that she’d been crying.

“Come on, then,” she said curtly, in a dry voice full of suppressed tension. “G’night.”

That’s what she’d always say in parting, “G’night”, though the sun was still shining brightly. Her train left a few minutes after seven, but we were always at the station by six. That hour until the train departed seemed intolerably long. The station was always full of people, because down our way, going out to the railway station on a Sunday afternoon was one of the great, worldly pleasures of village life. Hardly anyone actually went anywhere; people just paraded up and down the platforms in their Sunday best, forming little groups, greeting one another, having a little walk. The gilded youth were all there, and there were plenty of colourful bright dresses on display. The lads were overcome with a mischievous cheer, the girls all giggled as if someone were tickling them. The two of us looked on, like an ageing couple, at all this happy youth, and sat in silence like before, beneath the peach tree. But this 29was a different kind of silence. Though I didn’t know why my mother had been crying, and come to think of it, I wasn’t too curious either, I was nonetheless all at once overcome with an endless, heart-wrenching pity for her.

Who can find their way in the impenetrable jungle that is a child’s heart? I’ll admit, even if you think me inhuman for it, that I never felt what you might call a son’s love for my mother. But I was almost always sorry for her. I felt so sorry for her I sometimes felt a physical pain around my heart. As small and ragged a child as I was, I felt stronger, smarter, and more capable than my mother. I remember, even at the age of six, I could have sworn I could handle my affairs better than her. But what could my mother have known of all that? I sat beside her politely and tried to make my face as dumb as a lowing calf’s.

The train arrived at last. The wheezing locomotive belched smoke and the sleepy little station filled with the exciting smell of farewells, distance and adventure. I was relieved when my mother had boarded, but my heart nonetheless still felt heavy somehow.

“God bless,” she said.

“God bless,” I replied.

Then the conductor blew his little horn and the train lurched forward. My mother never waved, but disappeared immediately behind the window.

30

4

Once, when i was watching her train depart, I was overcome by a strange and frightening excitement, a chilling, magical feeling that constricted my throat and that would for years and years come over me each time I smelt the smell of train smoke, so full of adventure.

I want to try and describe it as precisely as a medical diagnosis. I must have been six. It was a stifling early midsummer eve. I was standing barefoot by the rails, not thinking of anything, just watching the red lamp hanging on the back of the train vanish in the distance. All at once, for no reason whatsoever, I felt a heavy, dull, incomprehensible pressure in my chest, and my throat closed so convulsively that I could barely breathe. It only lasted a few minutes altogether, but those few minutes were so frightening and so desolate that I lost my head completely. My heart pounded at my ribs and I felt my tears flowing into my mouth. I felt a terrifying, sharp, shooting pain, an almost physical desire to… leave. Leave my mother, leave old Rozi, leave the village. Where to? I didn’t know. Why? I didn’t know. I had no rational goal in mind, no clear desire, only an idea. To go, go, go.

But I was a peasant boy, with a peasant’s common sense, and half an hour later, I was saying to myself: “foolishness!”

But whenever I smelt the sharp, exciting odour of train smoke, I was overcome again by that strange and frightening desire, so that I began to scare myself.

My teenage father must have felt the same when he ran away from home. It may even have been just such a stifling midsummer eve when he was overcome by wanderlust, and perhaps he didn’t know either where to or why, but just upped and went, like a sleepwalker, following his irresistible desire.

On these occasions, I would avoid the high street, which was always crowded on Sunday evenings in summer. Peasants, if they’re not given 31to drink, don’t really know what to do with their time on a Sunday evening. Those were long days, and by the afternoon, people had recovered from the week, done their share of this and that, and were bored of doing nothing. They stood around their garden gates, as if they’d been waiting for Monday to come by the evening train. That was how people spent their Sundays.

I made my way home with a big detour through the fields. Until I was out of the village, I paid meticulous attention, as always, to my “rep”. I ambled along with heavy, deliberate steps, hands in pockets, chin pressed down onto my neck, like an old peasant. Now and then I would spit juicily out of the corner of my mouth, for I was absolutely convinced that that sort of thing enhanced one’s reputation. But as soon as the last houses faded behind me, I broke into a sudden run as if I’d been possessed. I ran through fields, meadows and pastures for as long as my legs would carry me. Then I would throw myself face down in the grass, panting, and lay perfectly still. The total opposite of before. The whole day’s confusion would evaporate from my head, and the dumb tension in my nerves would ease off. I felt, lying in the young grass, beneath the unexpectedly broad sky, like someone who, after travelling strange and dangerous shores, had finally come home.

Dusk was gathering, but only the early dusk, when it seems you’re seeing the world through a pane of glass gently overspread with a pale fog of breath. The field was pouring out the sunlight it had absorbed and there was the smell of warm earth as the sun bled on the horizon. The sky was dappled like a wonderful, endless peasant shawl, and somewhere in the distance the cowbells of a herd returning home sounded dully. I was home.

I wended my way back to the village quietly, humming. By nature, I could never walk past even the dirtiest cow, the shabbiest horse or the mangiest dog without giving them a long, tender pat. I felt an odd, unbounded love for animals. There weren’t many people for whom I felt as much affection as I felt for, say, dogs. I didn’t love anyone, not even my own mother, but it seems that man must love something, and in my case, that was animals. I was on friendly terms with all of them. Even the 32most vicious dogs in the village liked me, and even the Count’s haughty greyhounds made a fuss of me, though I had no food to give them.

Few dogs had it as bad as I did. I almost always left the table hungry. The old woman was not one for equality, and every child was looked after according to their mother’s means. And yet there weren’t really significant differences, except for me, because the mothers used to visit their children regularly, and they would complain about any injustices. Péter would protest that Pál was getting better food, while Pál would whine that Istvány was getting more to eat. The poor little servant girls felt sorry for them, and they always managed somehow to produce the requisite little sums, so that a week later Péter would be eating the same as Pál and Pál would be getting just as much as Istvány. But who was there to care for me?

My mother, when she visited, was always having to make excuses for being behind on her payments. The poor thing really was in no position so much as to bring up the matter of how the old woman was feeding me. Day after day, I had to watch children my own age get more, and better, food than me. Is it any wonder, then, that I turned out the way I did?

There were moments in my childhood when I would have been capable of doing anything for a good meal.

I stole, I confess. I was like a magpie. In vain did the old woman keep everything under lock and key from me; necessity and practice honed my thieving into a fine art. There was hell to pay, of course, when she found out, but I never once felt remorse—I remember that clearly. There are situations in life in which not stealing is downright perverse. I hold that to be true to this day.

Was I meant to waste away, emaciated and consumptive, just to protect that tired old whore’s filthy, ill-gotten goods? Not me!

Gradually, I became as determined and cunning as a prowling fox. I realized, for example, that you could turn the human thirst for revenge to your advantage. For, it should be noted, children still live by the rule of the fist. The stronger is always right, and every boy wanted to be right. Not me. I was hungry, and didn’t give a damn about Platonic truth. There is only one truth for the hungry: bread. I didn’t fight out 33of amateur enthusiasm, like the other children. For me, fighting was a serious, breadwinning, affair. Whenever two boys would start to quarrel, I would go up to the weaker one and say:

“How much’ll you give me to lay him out for you?”

I asked ten fillérs, but I was willing to take on anyone for two, though the business did have its risks. The children almost all belonged to gangs, and sometimes I found myself up against an entire band. I left the battlefield with a bloodied head more than once, but I didn’t care. The coins tinkling in my pockets made the happiest sound in the world, and I could go to the shop and get myself some bread.

The great highwayman Sándor Rózsa was my hero. Other boys wanted to be priests or generals, but I longed to be an outlaw who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. I didn’t actually distribute what I got, but then again, I would have been hard pressed to find anyone poorer in the village than myself.

34

5

In the autumn of 1919—I was six at the time—my mother lost her position. Instead of postal orders, the poor thing now kept sending begging letters to the old woman, one after the other, imploring her for goodness’ sake to wait, at least till the first of next month, she was bound to find a new position by then. But she didn’t.

One day, as I was innocently sitting down to eat with the other boys, the old woman burst out of the kitchen and shrieked that there was to be no lunch for me, because my mother hadn’t paid a penny for my keep in four months.

“And you not sort of dear child I keep for love!”

At first, I didn’t understand. I just stood there with my legs spread wide, my hands in my pockets, my chin down on my neck, and watched the old woman rant, waving in her hand my mother’s letter, which must have just arrived.

“If your filthy mother don’t owe so much,” she screamed, “I throw you out in street long ago, stinking gallows rat!”

I was still silent. The other children had begun to eat. My mouth began to water as I watched them. I remember it was potato paprikás with kolbász sausage, and I can still sense its pleasant, tickling aroma. I was damnably hungry. My throat was constricted with sobs, but I wouldn’t have cried for all the world. I could see the children’s sly expressions as they leant low over their plates and shoved each other under the table, waiting to see what came next. So I paid special attention to my rep.

“Muther’ll send those few pengős soon enough,” I said, trying to reason with her, “please give me somethin’ to eat, I’m so hungry.”

“Sorry,” the old woman said, shaking her head. “Why you not tell whore mother not to make herself child if she not pay for it!”

I saw that the boys could barely contain their laughter. An incredible anger took hold of me, I was trembling all over. 35

“You’re the whore!” I screamed, beside myself, and ran off.

The old woman was not usually the generous type, but when I said that, she threw the whole dish of potatoes at me so hard that it shattered into pieces. Fortunately, it only hit my backside and didn’t do any serious damage. I kept running, but even out in the street, I could feel the good, hot paprikás dripping off my rear.

I was filled with impotent rage. My first thought was to go round the back of the house and take the old woman’s eye out with a slingshot. I believe I could have strangled her without blinking, but I had learnt that you can’t eat rage, and so I turned my attention to more practical propositions. I looked around the village to see where I could steal something. I couldn’t steal anything. I was beset by ill fortune; I couldn’t pilfer so much as a piece of fruit. As soon as my old friends, the dogs, saw me, they broke into such a chorus of yaps in their excitement that the farmers’ wives appeared straight away in their kitchen doors. I spent hours hunting around like that, in vain.

All of a sudden, I found myself in front of the school. It was teatime, and the children were chasing around in the yard outside. Most of them had thick slices of bread spread with lard or jam, but had forgotten about them, they were so deeply involved in their games. They were charging round like mad, and only stopped for a moment now and then so they could, panting and on the fly, quite casually take a bite or two of their bread. I, meanwhile, was almost faint with hunger.